Introduction of the artist:

Marcel DZAMA (Canada)

Born in 1974, Winnipeg, Canada. Lives and works in New York. Selected solo exhibitions: 2012 With or Without Reason, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Spain / 2011 The Never Known into the Forgotten, KunstvereinBraunschweig, Germany / 2010 Of Many Turns, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada / 2008 Edition 46 - Marcel Dzama, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany / Selected group exhibitions: 2012 Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration, MoMA, New York / 2009 Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection, MoMA, New York / 2009 Moby Dick, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco / 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Introduction of works:

Demons, Dancers, and Drinkers, ink and gouache on paper, 35.6×27.9 cm, 2011
courtesy David Zwirner, New York, DZAMA3195

Demons, Dancers, and Drinkers, ink and gouache on paper, 35.6×27.9 cm, 2011
courtesy David Zwirner, New York, DZAMA3195

Marcel Dzama is well known for his small-scale, quirky ink drawings and watercolours, depicting with idiosyncratic humour scenes of ambiguous relationships between figures, objects and events. His images arise out of a broad range of stylistic sources across high and low culture, from children’s book illustrations to MTV and comic strip characters; from film noir and science fiction to Surrealism, whilst evoking the pathos of great literature. They have a powerful simplicity betrayed as faux na?veté especially in portrayals of strange rituals, depravity and fetishism.

Large-scale drawings show modest but intensely detailed figures floating freely within the expanse of paper devoid of landmarks, with no evidence of context to help locate their presence or oddly mutant existence. There is little visual information, for example, to help us ascertain whether a human figure with an animal head is some uncanny collision, the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong or merely a pantomime costume. Through an avoidance of irony, Dzama’s imagery retains innocence and radiates a kind of purity; subjects seem stripped of any political or philosophical pretension and any specific narrative. Such ambiguity, conveyed with all the the intensity and awkwardness of amateur dramatics, also characterises his more recent video and sculptural pieces.